Walkin' My Baby Back Home
by The Cry-Wank Kid
Summary: One shot: One summer night in 1919, young Nora enjoys a perfectly lovely date with a handsome, mysterious boy named James March. Ahem. Perfectly lovely.


_Gee it's great after being out late / walkin' my baby back home / arm in arm over meadow and farm / walkin' my baby back home..._

There are footprints going both ways on the Tin Lizzy's windshield. Nora can hear the night-crickets, smell the night-deep woods and floral- _feel_ the night, soft and lukewarm around her, heavy and humid. That and James.

His weight atop her is cloistering in the very best way that boys are, strong and protective and radiating heat. They're both sweating, his clean woodsy boy-smell a secret just for her beneath his dress clothes. Inside of her: he's filling and hard and warm and maddeningly close to the perfect spot.

"Nora... _oh_ darling..." he whispers, frantic, hips going. He's so intent on finishing that it's almost violent.

 _We go along harmonizing a song / or I'm reciting a poem / owls go by and they give me the eye / walkin' my baby back home..._

"Well don't _stop!_ " she yells at him when he draws a breath, and he delves deeper, the base of him against her outer nub of flesh and the tip of him hitting the ridged spot deep inside. She shudders, cries out, muffled abruptly when one broad palm claps over her mouth. The energy of her scream, trapped, travels instead down to her toes and bubbles up again, through her legs and her knees and the cavern of her hipbones, salty and stinging and full. She is like a champagne glass.

James removes his hand as suddenly as he applied it. "Oh goodness," he pants, panicked, narrow hips like a jackhammer against her slightly curved ones. She takes his flat hips in her long hands and helps him, feeling his warm release fill her. He suppresses a cry, sweat drips from temples, and then he is still. His eyes above her are flat black. Radio static.

After a moment he pulls out, rolls over, tugs his slacks back up and rummages down beneath the seat for his cigarettes. He waits, pressing one into a long holder while Nora tugs her satin underthings on and uses her rumpled dress to cover her bare breasts. She can feel the mess begin to dribble down into the lace-trimmed satin, warm and sticking and human. She might even be bleeding a little. Goodness. The laundress at the finishing school dorm had better not say a word about it, the old bat.

She takes the cigarette and allows James to strike a match and light it before he does the one held unadorned in his own hand. The Tin Lizzy is an old model, 1908, resembling an old buggy more than an automobile, so no roof or windows shield the young pair from the humid, light-chilly night air.

Nora breaths deeply, her cream satin T-straps slightly scuffed on the dash, a spot of dirt adorning the side of one. Her every limb feels stretched and easy, released and relaxed. For once in her existence, there are no expectations, no stifling rules. Just her and the night, the delicious tang of nicotine and sex and someone handsome and dangerous.

She laughs, easy and unselfconscious. "You careless boy," she chides. "What are you going to do if you get me in the family way, huh?"

"Marry you, of course," James says.

Nora laughs again, stifling a snort. She can't help it. The boy works taking tickets at the new motion picture theater in town. He's hardly got a dollar to his name.

"Now it isn't funny, Nora," he insists intently. "I swear it. I'll be richer than any old doctor or lawyer, just you wait. I'll be able to give you everything you could ever dream of and more."

Nora sighs, exhaling velvet smoke into the black, buggy air. "My parents want me to marry Charles Montgomery," she gripes. Pulls a face. "He's a medical student. And from a _very prominent family."_

She looks sidelong at the man beside her, shirtless with his beaten-up oxfords on the dash, dark hair mussed and young face very serious. With his narrow waist and wide eyes he is barely out of boyhood, his sweet pale face devoid of beard or mustache. And yet... something about him isn't childlike at all. As if he's seen things.

"Run away with me," he says.

"Oh, James, please..."

"Just for a _moment,_ Nora." He stubs out his cigarette, pulls on his shirt and begins on the buttons. "Let me show you something beautiful."

The front seat is a flurry of vest and tie and corset and dress, of hairpins, of combs and handkerchiefs passed back and forth to straighten wayward hair and wipe smudged lipstick from improper places. As he leads her on foot down the wooded path, not even the light from cigarettes remains. Just black and owls and his strong hand closed around hers. She is stumbling, laughing. For a moment here, it's still a joke.

Then they stop. Her blue eyes take in the little clearing, surrounded circularly by tall trees and all aglow with fireflies. It takes her breath away: alight, delighted. It's the perfect way to end an evening of a vampire motion picture at the theater, clutching James' safe hand in the darkened hall and watching Felix The Cat, in the little moving-illustration short before the film, reflect in the black pools of his eyes.

"Oh, James..."

Silent, he takes her hand and leads her to the center, the ground below them slightly uneven. Nora is a tall girl; with the heels of her shoes she is nearly eye-level with him, but she bows her head, allowing him to plant a kiss atop her blonde curls.

"It's beautiful..."

"Like you, darling."

She shifts, nearly tripping over the abruptly uneven ground. It's soft and hard in places, as if someone dug it up recently and then packed back over it. Peculiar.

"But that smell..."

"Surely I don't know what you're talking about, Nora."

She tenses, suddenly uneasy in his arms. "No, there truly is a smell, there is. It's like..."

"Shh, sweet girl..."

 _We stop for a while / she gives me a smile / snuggles her head to my chest / We start to pet, and that's when I get / her talcum all over my vest..._

But it's there, rank and growing in her nostrils, and as her heart rate rises she is certain it can only mean one thing. She's holding on; steady, not quite believing, and then she glances down, feeling something-a rock, maybe?-against the toe of her shoe.

Her heart stops, leaping to her throat. She shrieks, pulls away from James, and bolts, tripping over sticks and stones and not sure where she's going.

James pauses for a moment, arrested. Looks down.

 _Drat!_ he thinks, stamping the earth down impatiently over his sloppy handiwork. _I thought I made sure this time. Ah, well..._

She only makes it about fifteen feet. Then she half-collapses behind a large tree and hugs herself, panting.

"Nora..."

"Stay away!"

"My word, you're trembling."

She feels his hands on her upper arms, welcome and steady, and even now her body wants to fall into his, the warm young strength of his arms and chest and shoulders. But she forces herself to be stiff now, unyielding.

"That smell," she shudders, shrill, "I know that smell, and only one thing in the world smells like that! It smelled like when Uncle Albert died and was laid out for too long in the parlor because grandmother couldn't make it home quickly enough! And he grew all gray and loose-skinned and didn't look like himself anymore, like a strange monster instead and..."

James cuts her off with a chuckle. It almost reads as sinister, but when she looks up in the dim light he's grinning, sweet and dimpled, and his deep sad eyes are kind. "I beg your pardon, sweet girl," he says, "but I can't exert control over nature." He shrugs, looking abashed. "A wild animal of some sort must have died near here before I took you. My goodness, miss, I really apologize." He laughs, as if he can't believe himself. "Criminey! That's what I get for trying to be romantic way out here, just my luck..."

Nora catches a shudder in her throat, her shoulders relaxing under his steady hands. "An animal..." she pants, "...of course. Oh, James, I'm so sorry... I just thought... I mean for a moment I just felt..."

James strokes the young socialite's face with his fingers. "No more horror motion pictures for you, dear," he says sweetly. "Come now, let's get you home."

* * *

He parks a few blocks from the boarding house so that the headmistress won't know Nora was out. Insists on getting out with her and walking her the several blocks to her doorstep, one solid arm protectively around her.

"I'm awfully sorry, James," she says again as they reach the boarding school's gate. "I just don't know what came over me... for a moment there in the woods I..." She pauses, swallows a shudder. "...Well I thought I saw _fingers._ A hand. As if someone had tried to... claw their way out of a grave... Oh, it all sounds so silly now, but at the moment..."

James chuckles cordially. "I think all the vampires and spooks in that motion picture got to you," he says.

And for some strange reason, her blood runs cold, the hair at the nape of her neck standing on end like a black cat's. Still.

He flashes a warm smile, dimples and the rounded cheeks of boyhood and big, haunted dark eyes. "But we can't go letting our imaginations run away with us, now can we?"

"No," Nora mutters, closing her arms loosely around herself and looking down at her muddied shoes. "No, I suppose not..."

James places a finger below her pointed chin and draws it gently upward, placing a quick, chaste kiss on her closed mouth.

"Goodnight, Nora."

She breaths in, reaching for the doorknob. Not quite wanting to turn her back yet.

 _After I kinda straighten my tie / she has to borrow my comb / One kiss then, we continue again / walkin' my baby back home..._

"Goodnight, James."


End file.
